The Social Democratic Party has slammed the continuing practice of paying ransoms to kidnappers, saying the flow of cash only fuels the terror gangs that now operate across every region of Nigeria. National Publicity Secretary Araba Rufus Aiyenigba, in a Tuesday release from Abuja, argued that the payments embolden criminals who already kill, rape and abduct with little fear of being caught.
The party painted a grim picture of a country where "the lives of citizens have become distressingly cheap," noting that bandits now turn major highways into death traps, chase farmers off ancestral land and hold women and girls as sex slaves in forest camps. It listed armed herdsmen burning entire villages in the North-Central and North-West, unknown gunmen targeting security personnel in the South-East and marauders emptying once-rich farmland in the South-West. According to the statement, the tragedy persists "not from lack of capacity but lack of political will to do the needful to secure our lands and people."
Araba Rufus Aiyenigba's claim that Nigeria's security collapse stems from "lack of political will" lands like a direct punch at the President, the National Security Adviser and every state governor who still signs off on ransom deals behind closed doors while publicly denying the payments. The SDP statement forces into the open what communities whisper: someone is authorising these cash drops, and the trail is not hidden from the top.
The party's regional roll-call of horror shows how banditry has become a lucrative, low-risk enterprise. When Abuja-Kaduna road users can be abducted in broad daylight and farmers in the South-West abandon cocoa and cassava fields, the economy bleeds from both ends—transport costs rise and food prices climb—yet the 2024 security vote budget lines remain opaque. Ransom cash keeps the vicious cycle turning: each naira paid buys more rifles and recruitment.
For families of the Chibok, Dapchi or Abuja-bound travellers currently in captivity, the moral debate is academic. They will scrape together whatever millions the kidnappers demand because the state has left them no credible rescue option. Until courts start jailing the negotiators and financiers—not just the gunmen—every Nigerian with a child in a boarding school or a farm in the hinterland remains a potential customer.
What the SDP did not say, but every voter heard, is that the 2027 campaign trail is already being mapped in bush camps where kingpins calculate which governor or senator can deliver the smoothest ransom pipeline.
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